


you are a tourist

by baliset



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: 12x100, Constrained Writing, M/M, Season 2, Vignettes, brief mention of drug use, mentions of incineration, non-maincord compliant swearing, road trips and travel, vaguely secret relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-17 14:35:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29473335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baliset/pseuds/baliset
Summary: “Where are you from, anyway?” Mike asks one night in the back of the van, passing the dwindling stub of a joint between his fingers back over to Derrick.“Nowhere,” Derrick says.(or: 12 vignettes about two pitchers in 12 towns.)
Relationships: Mike Townsend/Derrick Krueger
Comments: 8
Kudos: 28





	you are a tourist

**Author's Note:**

> the 12x100 format is by [lewis atillo](https://pigeonize.medium.com/), brought to blaseball by crookedsaint's fic [let me let you down](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29314074)!

1.

“Where are you from, anyway?” Mike asks one night in the back of the van, passing the dwindling stub of a joint between his fingers back over to Derrick.

“Nowhere,” Derrick says. He takes the joint, and pauses. “Oregon, I guess.”

“You _guess_.”

“Parents divorced when I was three. I moved between houses a lot.” Derrick leans his cheek on Mike’s shoulder. He exhales a mouthful of smoke. “Now I have a house that moves around.”

Derrick’s cadence says he thinks he’s being funny. Mike doesn’t think it’s funny. He thinks it might be the loneliest thing he’s ever heard.

2.

The plane shudders as its wheels leave the Miami tarmac. Mike sweats through his flannel and taps his pen against the notebook in his lap, waits to be allowed to put his tray table down, watches the palm trees and swamps grow smaller, smaller, smaller until they are the size of postage stamps in the window. 

Derrick is already asleep with his chin on his chest. He never wears sleeveless shirts in Seattle, but now his arms are exposed, pale and gangly, each birthmark a topography symbol on a foreign map. It feels voyeuristic to study them; Mike does anyway.

3.

Arturo shuts out the Spies. Teddy takes the whole team out for drinks at the worst dive bar he can find. The floor is sticky and the music is loud and Mike nurses a gin and tonic he doesn’t really want in a darkened corner of the room.

“I’m gonna ride the mechanical bull,” Derrick says, leaning in so close that their bodies intersect at three distinct points.

“Don’t show off for me,” Mike says. “You’re gonna eat shit.”

Derrick does both. When Mike kisses him later, in their shared room, his split lip tastes sharply of iron and salt.

4.

Mike lies in the hotel all day and wrecks his wrists on Tetris, restless, peeling off layers of clothing like a snake shedding skin. The heat in Hades is too raw for him. The shades follow him everywhere, a wispy cloud of death rolling behind him. He can’t stand to be outside when he’s not pitching.

Derrick disappears for an hour and comes back with a box, sets it between them on the bed. It’s a cupcake, pink-frosted, candle stuck in it at a haphazard angle.

“Happy birthday,” Derrick says.

“Oh,” Mike says. He had forgotten, with all the travel.

5.  
  


Overheard at the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Gardens:

“I hate Dallas.”

“No you don’t, man.”

“Bullshit. Name one good thing about Dallas.”

“I’ll name three if you name one.”

“Sure.”

“One. The arboretum.”

“Two?”

“The botanical gardens.”

“I’m afraid to ask what the third could be.”

“The Telephone twins. Smoking hot, and there’s posters of them everywhere.”

Laughter. “Fuck you, Derrick.”

“Not my fault you don’t have taste. Okay, now you go.”

A pause, then:

“Country radio.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t know you liked country.”

“I don’t.”

“So why country radio?”

“Don’t have to hear my name in the songs.”

6.

Baltimore is the wettest place Mike has ever been, wetter than Seattle, rain crashing out of the sky and into the Harbor and hitting the pavement like gunfire. He and Derrick shelter under an awning in Little Italy, blocks from their hotel. Derrick hunches over to fit and hooks a hand in Mike’s collar, pulling him closer, wrapping them both in the same oversized flannel and the warm light of the bakery window behind them. Mike feels Derrick’s pulse against his cheek through a thin fabric barrier and thinks this might be the closest to home he’s felt all year.

7.

They take Derrick’s van down to Los Angeles, a reprieve from commuting in close quarters with teammates who could all be described as acquired tastes. Neither Derrick nor Mike really sleeps, too enamored with the freedom of a road trip, the music on the radio, watching each other watch the scenery roll by outside. They barely talk, either.

At a gas station near the California border, Derrick offers Mike the wheel for the next few hours. He never lets anyone else drive the van; it feels like an admission of something. Mike starts the engine, and doesn’t ask about it.

8.

A three hour flight and Seattle mist turns to snow, slick on the Breckinridge ground. There’s an iced-over lake near the Pocket where the Jazz Hands go skating after games, and the Garages go to show off or slip and stumble and fall on their asses. Mike finds Derrick on the sidelines and sits with him, a thermos of hot chocolate warming the small space on the bench where their legs don’t brush each others’ in public.

“Not gonna eat shit to impress me this time,” Mike says, teasing.

Derrick snorts. “Skating’s not my thing.”

“Neither was the mechanical bull.”

9.

Mike wishes he remembered Philadelphia in the sun, without the dark cast of solar eclipse hanging over it. He wishes he didn’t flinch every time he sees a head jerk towards him on the field, didn’t remember Jaylen burning up on the mound on Election Day. He wishes the Garages didn’t write songs about him going up in flame.

He goes to the Museum of Art alone while Derrick is pitching a game, walks around cold rooms filled with armor and guns and feels nothing about them. He imagines Derrick’s commentary in his ear and wishes he hadn’t come alone.

10.

“You should get boots,” Mike says when Derrick comes back, grimacing, from smoking outside. It’s hard to walk anywhere in Halifax without at least an inch of water underfoot. It seeps in through the holes in the bottoms of Mike’s Chuck Taylors, leaving his socks damp on the bottoms, his toes frigid. He has to imagine it’s the same for Derrick.

“I’m fine,” Derrick insists. 

Mike elects to ignore it, and slips a pair of black rain boots into Derrick’s luggage for him to find when they get back to Seattle. A present for a birthday Mike assumes he missed.

11.

The end of the season carries no pressure; everyone knows the Garages aren’t going to the playoffs this year. Derrick and Mike aren’t even pitching the last series. They slip out of the dugout in Mexico City to drink beer in the stands and watch the Wings score run after run on Tot, then Arturo, then Ron, pushing the numbers on the scoreboard into embarrassing territories.

“And _we’re_ the shitty pitchers,” Derrick says, his foot hooked comfortably around Mike’s in the eclipse-dark shadows below their seats. His ankles are bare, his skin as cold as the bottle in Mike’s hand.

12.  
  


Rhys Trombone is incinerated in the Hellmouth. Bennett follows him two days later.

In the dugout, Derrick’s hand finds Mike’s on the bench and squeezes it like a lifeline, hard enough to hurt. Both of their palms are dry from desert heat, Mike’s knuckles papery and threatening to split.

“I don’t want to die in a different city,” Derrick says, his voice low.

“You can’t die in Seattle, either,” Mike says. He hasn’t taken his eyes off the spot in the outfield where Bennett used to be.

“Seattle is a different city,” Derrick says, leaning his cheek on Mike’s shoulder.

**Author's Note:**

> title is from you are a tourist by death cab for cutie. you can find me on twitter @corpserevivers or in the crabitat discord server, and comments and are as always appreciated!


End file.
